The Buddha allegedly ate meat. There are disputes whether or not MN 55 and a similar passage in the commentaries have been translated correctly.
How convenient
There is no getting around the fact that the Buddha is recorded as having eaten meat, that he refused to make it a rule for monks when pressured to and that he never made vegetarianism a rule
Think about it. It would have been easy to say "Dont eat meat", just like the jains ... but he didnt
In the two version of the suttas I have found the part where the Buddha states he will eat meat is in parenthesis. I need to research what the parenthesis mean and I am following up on the source of the claim of the translation error. According to the monk who told me this MN 55 should have been translated as "I will eat almsfood if I can't tell if there is meat in it"
.
"Taking life, beating, wounding, binding, stealing, lying, deceiving, worthless knowledge, adultery; this is stench. Not the eating of meat." Amagandha Sutta
And when Devadatta tried to get the Buddha to enforce vegetarianism, he refused
As to your second point I think your reasoning is at fault. Current cultural culinary tastes are not laws of physics, they can change.
That wasnt my reasoning, they can change of course but the
likelihood of everyone becoming vegetarian is slim
The second part of your second point seems to be saying we have to keep eating meet because if large amounts of people stopped all at once some meat would be wasted by being thrown away ( probably can be used for fertilizer ). That would mean you would have to keep perpetuating an unethical act to keep the results of previous unethical acts from being wasteful.
No I am saying that the majority of humans eat meat, that most of the meat in the supermarket will be thrown out regardless of it I buy it or not
Personally I do eat meat when its offered to me (family meals etc) or when I need to buy it due to finances, apart from those circumstances I eat vegetarian food.
As far as ethics go, forget about Buddhism and forget about the suffering to livestock animals, many of whom are as intelligent as dogs or young human children. Meat production contributes more to the greenhouse effect of global climate change than the transportation industry.
I have seen arguments that vegetarian diets leads to pollution etc. There are arguments on both sides.
Do you have kids? Do you want them, their friends or your grandchildren to live in the future resulting from global climate change?
No I dont have kids and I dont want them.